


Human Condition

by Jain



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Other, POV Third Person, Past Tense, Post-Season/Series 03, Statements of Exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-21 18:03:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16581401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jain/pseuds/Jain
Summary: Tim should've died in the wax museum. Unfortunately, he was rescued instead.





	Human Condition

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lontradiction](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lontradiction/gifts).



> Content warning: brief suicidal thoughts.

Danny's skin was very soft. Tim shook his head mentally. No, _not_ Danny; that thing was not his brother, no matter how carefully it tended his wounds or how gently it cleaned Tim's filthy, banged-up body.

Its skin was different from most of the others, though. Tim had been manhandled by enough of them to have a basis of comparison, shuddering in the grasp of hard, leathery, inhuman hands, or the even more inhuman touch of plastic.

The thing wearing Tim's brother still felt human.

He asked about it on his first day of more-than-fleeting consciousness, when his head wound was still making everything feel distant and unreal. The thing ran a disgustingly proprietary hand down its bare forearm and said, "Well, I wasn't a smoker, I ate my vegetables, I actually knew what moisturizer was for. Not everyone's so careful."

 _"I, I, I,"_ as though it actually were Danny and not a monster.

Tim resolved not to ask it any more questions.

* * *

It was an easy resolution to make when he was lucid for no more than a few minutes at a time.

It became a lot harder as his concussion or whatever it was healed, and the reality of his situation became increasingly clear to him.

They hadn't tied him up or anything. They didn't need to, not even when he slowly began to regain his strength. They were stronger.

Nor was escape a possibility. Tim's prison was a basement, with a dirt floor, heavy stone walls, and a pervasive smell of damp. There were no windows and just one exit: a trapdoor at the top of a wooden staircase. The trapdoor itself was barred or padlocked or covered by a heavy weight, or maybe all three at once. Regardless, it was immovable despite all of Tim's admittedly weak and shaky efforts.

Oh, and because the monsters who'd imprisoned him had apparently never met a horror cliche they didn't like, Tim's prison was also totally dark. There were bare bulbs set in the ceiling, but no lightswitch inside the basement.

Sometimes--but never on a schedule that Tim could discern--the thing that wasn't Danny turned on the lights when it came down into the basement. The others didn't bother.

Tim had never been afraid of the dark before, but he learned quickly enough. First would come the faint scrape of wood on wood as the trapdoor was lifted, and then...

If it was Da--the thing that wasn't Danny, it would usually talk to Tim as it went about whatever errand had brought it into the basement. Giving Tim his next meal, replacing his empty water bottles, cleaning his wounds, changing his bandages. It didn't seem to mind that Tim never answered.

The others didn't talk. Sometimes they would walk with deliberately slow and heavy footsteps, other times they would be silent and Tim would strain his ears for any sound, despite knowing that he'd hear nothing before an inhuman hand reached out of the dark and touched him. (Danny occasionally came in the daytime, faded sunshine pouring down the staircase with his approach. The other monsters only ever came at night.)

They hadn't even hurt him yet, but their touch made Tim's flesh crawl and bile rise in his throat and his body prickle with fear sweat that the monsters would then wipe away.

It was all horribly, _ludicrously_ unsubtle. He maybe hated them for that most of all.

Tim had been prepared to die in that wax museum, but he hadn't been prepared for this. More than once, he found himself contemplating those bare lightbulbs. He knew he could slit his wrists if he had to. He was far less certain that he could cut his skin frequently and badly enough that it would be unusable after his death.

Eventually, he broke. The thing that wasn't Danny had turned the lights on to bring Tim his dinner, or possibly his breakfast or lunch; Tim had no time sense left after countless days spent underground in the dark. The meal was a couple of peri-peri chicken wraps, though, so he didn't want to call it breakfast.

He thought about telling it that he'd rather gone off mystery meat after some of the statements he'd had to look into--not actually intending to breathe a word--but somehow that idle thought and his pervasive fears combined, and what came out of his mouth was, "Can you leave the lights on when you go?"

The thing looked at him with that awful glassy stare, and then shrugged. "If you like."

Tim just nodded. What he'd _like_ was for the thing to open the door and let him leave, to go back to his flat, and his awful job, and his only slightly less awful coworkers.

(He felt guilty the very moment he had that thought. He was pretty sure Jon and Daisy were dead, and for all that he'd halfway hated Jon and been more than halfway terrified of Daisy, he hadn't wanted either of them to die. And Martin and Basira were all right really, and Melanie was...a little too much like looking in a mirror sometimes, but otherwise fine.)

But that wasn't anything he could think about for too long. He thought instead about the lights, and how they would stay on even after the thing left, and how much time Tim would spend just _looking_ around the basement rather than staring sightlessly into the dark.

The thing said, "Do you think he's going to save you?"

Tim blinked, confused. The only 'he' he could think of who was a candidate for that role was Martin, and that was a pretty obvious non-starter. "Who?" he asked.

"Elias," the thing said in the same tone of voice Danny had always used when he thought Tim was being unnecessarily dense. "Why else would you want him watching you?"

That surprised a bitter laugh out of Tim. "I don't care if he's watching me." It wasn't strictly true, but he wished it were: that Elias was just that irrelevant to him. It was as much of the truth as he was willing to share with the thing, in any case. "And no, I'm quite certain Elias isn't going to save me. He's probably eating popcorn on his sofa right now. Unless Martin and Melanie actually pulled Martin's plan off, I guess, in which case he's eating metaphorical popcorn on his prison bed."

The thing's mouth quirked up in a horribly inviting smile. "We could make the show more interesting for him."

"Please don't," Tim said automatically. He hadn't been tortured yet--unless you counted being locked up alone in a pitch-black basement and menaced by monsters, which actually he sort of did--and he wasn't looking forward to it.

"I don't think you mean that," the thing said and stepped closer.

Tim backed up fast; it followed him. Eventually they dead-ended in a corner.

He opened his mouth to say--he didn't know what. There was nothing inside it to be reached; he knew that.

The thing raised its hand, inhumanly fast, and before Tim knew what was happening, two of Danny's--dammit, _not_ Danny's--fingers were in his mouth. He made a muffled protest. The thing stroked his tongue with its soft, soft fingers.

"Shh," it said. "This doesn't have to hurt."

It pressed its other hand against Tim's crotch, staring at Tim with wide glass eyes set in his brother's face, and _fuck_ its psychopathic reassurances, this was hurting Tim already. It was killing him.

He bit down, hard, on the fingers in his mouth.

It was like biting a foam pillow, soft and firm and boneless. The thing didn't flinch, but the hand on Tim's crotch squeezed tighter in an unsubtle threat.

Tim stopped biting. Even if he managed to damage it, he couldn't _hurt_ it, and he'd rather not find out what the thing would do to him in retaliation.

"That's better," the thing crooned. The hand on Tim's crotch shifted upwards to unfasten his trousers and push them down along with his pants, exposing him. The fingers of its other hand slipped out of Tim's mouth and traced wetly along his jaw, rubbed his lips.

Tim closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the wall, and tried not to feel any of it.

The thing's hands were soft, but too cold. Unfortunately, that small discomfort wasn't enough to prevent Tim from getting hard when it tugged relentlessly on his cock, especially when it leaned in close to whisper filth in Tim's ear.

That he'd seen how Tim used to look at him, before. That he'd been looking back. That every night he'd stayed over on Tim's sofa, he'd thought about getting up and going to the bedroom, slipping naked into Tim's bed the way both of them wanted.

It wasn't true. None of it was true. But the thing kept talking in Danny's voice, soft and a little uncertain, the way Danny almost never was, and Tim couldn't help but drink in every filthy word.

When Tim started crying, it licked the tears away with a tongue as dry and rough as a cat's.

Tim shuddered as he came, more from disgust than from pleasure. He'd never known that an orgasm could make him feel like shit. He wished he'd never had to find out.

The thing brushed a kiss over Tim's open, panting mouth. "I love you, Tim," it said in Danny's voice. And despite everything, a tiny, desperately aching part of Tim wished that he could say the words back.


End file.
